SUMMARY

The present volume of the Ethos is entitled O n t h e P h i l o s o p h y o f K a r o l W o j t y ł a

and it aims at a reconstruction of the main currents of Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical output

which would later permeate his Magisterial teaching. Wojtyła’s philosophy stands in contrast

with the dominant intellectual trends of modernity. Unlike most contemporary philosophers,

who stress the importance of such categories as relations, structures, models and paradigms

Wojtyła was primarily interested in the category of human subjectivity and efficacy. The

authors of the articles included in the present volume express the conviction that a revival of

his philosophy might introduce fresh spirit in modern culture and shed a new light on the

moral problems of modernity.

The text F r o m t h e E d i t o r s points to the general marks of Wojtyła’s

philosophical anthropology and his moral philosophy, in particular to the experiential sources

of his thought.

In his address delivered to the participants in the European Theological Congress in

Częstochowa in 1991, Pope John Paul II analyzed the significance of theology as “the word

about God”, appealed for a revival of theology in the spirit of St. Ciril and Methodius, and

stressed that theology must always be preceded by that testimony that gives birth to it. The

Pope stated that the congress of theologians from Middle-Eastern Europe, held in Lublin, was

above all a record of testimonies on the life of the Church in the situation of oppression and

coercion, in her confrontation with the Marxist ideology. Referring to the words of Jesus

Christ: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” John Paul II stressed the true

sense of human freedom, reflected by the newest history of the Church and religion in the

countries of Middle and Eastern Europe.

Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, draws an outline of Karol Wojtyła’s anthropology, as it was

presented in his main philosophical work The Acting Person, and supplements it with his own

reflections on the essence of the moral drama of man. According to Wojtyła, anthropology

must be based on man’s experience of himself and of the world. This experience is conceived

of as a cognitive insight into what ontologically distinguishes man from non-personal beings.

As a result of this insight man comes into a cognitive relation with himself and this

experience must precede any theory of man. Thus the starting point of anthropology is

epistemologically independent and methodologically autonomous. The insights into one’s

own being serve as the only reliable criteria of accrediting a given philosophical system with a

cognitive value. Wojtyła holds that the primarily human experience is that of action: it is

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actions that “reveal” the person and the person should be looked at through the prism of his or

her actions. This idea is accompanied in Wojtyła’s anthropology by the methodological

attitude of openness to independent truth which manifests the bond between man’s

ontological grounding in the world and his consciousness. Man remains conscious of himself

as the subject of actions and as an object of his own reflection. By combining these two

aspects Wojtyła succeeded in eliminating the hiatus between the philosophy of being and the

philosophy of consciousness from his anthropological reflections. The experiential data

gathered by way of insight become then the data to be explained by way of metaphysical

reduction, and, in the course of this process, Wojtyła’s theory of man is built. In his opinion,

anthropology as such results from man’s “discovery” of himself which is manifested in his

conscious choice to follow in his life the truth he has recognized about himself. The crux is

that in his free act of self-cognition man cannot but simultaneously affirm the truth of himself

he has grasped in this very act. Human persons find their fulfillment in free surrender to the

truth about themselves they have recognized. This idea not only finds its confirmation and

poetic expression in Wojtyła’s poem The Birth of Confessors, where he says: “If I have truth

in me, it will break out one day. / I cannot repel it: my own self I’d repel,” but it reveals the

very heart of anthropology and ethics. In The Acting Person he clearly explains: “It is in the

conscience that there is achieved the peculiar union of moral truthfulness and duty that

manifests itself as the normative power of truth. In each of his actions the human person is

eyewitness of the transition from the «X is truly good» to «I should do X.”1 This is the

discovery of a sine qua non condition of following one’s conscience. “Being oneself” means

surrender to the truth one has recognized. But does surrender to truth violate surrender to

one’s own self? This question concerns the relationship between freedom and truth or

between man’s surrender to himself and his surrender to truth. The answer given by Wojtyła

is the following: while being bound by truth, the subject is simultaneously bound by himself

when he grasps the truth in his own cognitive act. Thus he is bound by truth only when he

binds himself with it in his own cognitive act. By surrendering to truth, the subject becomes

even more surrendered to himself. As a result man finds himself in the “trap” of truth, unable

to affirm himself in any other way than by confirming, in an act of free choice, the truth he

has asserted in his own cognitive act. However, man is capable of using his freedom against

himself, of abandoning his freedom in an act of “escape” from it, thus voluntarily imposing

enslavement on himself. Freedom, conceived of by Wojtyła as autonomous surrender to truth,

1 Card. K. W o j t y ł a, The Acting Person, trans. A. Potocki, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Boston-London 1979, p. 162.

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appears then to be constitutive for man’s identity as person. As there is a clear relation

between man’s respect for the truth he has asserted and his respect for himself as witness to

this truth, it appears that the rationality of man as person consists in the attitude of self-

governance. In this context human freedom can be defined as man’s self-transcendence or

auto-transcendence “in truth”. Therefore ethics can be also seen as normative anthropology.

The essence of the moral drama of man lies in the fact that he is capable of introducing a

hiatus into his own being by rejecting the truth he has recognized, which was aptly described

by Ovid in his adage Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. Such is the locus ethicae.

Yet ethics as moral philosophy is not merely descriptive in its presentation of the moral

situation of man. It must also attempt to provide the ultimate explanation of the plight of man,

and then it will become a metaphysics of man’s moral situation (this idea was expressed by

Pope John Paul II in Section 83 of his encyclical Fides et ratio). Man is a contingent being

and owes his existence to the generosity of his Creator. Thus man’s self-faithlessness turns

out to be also his faithlessness towards the Creator. Therefore ethics ultimately becomes a

philosophy of the Advent, and the final word in the drama of man belongs only to God, who

is Truth and Love.

The first block of articles is entitled A r o u n d t h e M y s t e r y o f t h e H u m a n

P e r s o n.

Card. Avery Dulles holds that the key concept in the teaching of Pope John Paul II is

that of the mystery of the human person. Already during his years as professor of philosophy,

Karol Wojtyła attempted to enrich St. Thomas Aquinas teaching on the human person with a

personalist tinge by stressing the person’s subjectivity and lived experience. Wojtyła’s

personalism was confirmed and deepened by his presence at the Second Vatican Council, in

particular by his involvement in the writing of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the

Modern World Gaudium et Spes, as well as in the debates on religious freedom. However,

while glorying in freedom, he always insisted that it is not an end in itself but a means of

personally adhering to the true good, as perceived by a judgment of conscience. He held that

severing the bonds between freedom and responsibility is erroneous: as freedom is inevitably

linked with responsibility, we are accountable for the use we make of it. In his continuing

struggle against Marxism in Poland after the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Wojtyła

decided to base his opposition on the criticism of the doctrine of the person, which was the

Achilles’ heel of the Communist regime. Later, as pope, John Paul II would continue to insist

that the extraordinary brutality of the 20th century was due to an unwillingness to recognize

the inherent value of the human person, who is made in the image and likeness of God, who

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confers upon it inalienable rights that can neither be bestowed nor withdrawn by any human

power. In The Acting Person, a work first published in 1969, Cardinal Wojtyla expounded a

theory of the person as a self-determining agent that realizes itself through free and

responsible action. He claimed that persons are essentially social and oriented to life in

community. They achieve themselves as persons by interaction, giving to others and receiving

from them in turn. To reconcile the good of the community with that of its individual

members, Wojtyła proposed a theory of participation, which contained an implicit critique not

only of Marxist collectivism but also of libertarian individualism and anarchist alienation.

Personalism permeated also all the themes of John Paul II’s papacy: his conception of the

Christian life itself, his ecclesiology, his theology of ecumenism and interreligious relations,

as well as his teaching on social matters, on human work and economic development.

Throughout his pontificate John Paul II would frequently refer to the priority of the ethical

over the technical, of the primacy of the person over things, of the superiority of the spirit

over matter. One could also observe that the Pope’s personalist involvement led him to a

certain reformulation of the traditional teaching on issues such as natural theology, natural

law, contraception, death penalty, just war and social order. In the realm of theology as such,

the Pope’s personalist orientation inspired particularly his approach to the questions of the

Kingship of Christ, Last Judgment and Purgatory.

In his speech delivered at the presentation of the Italian edition of the collected

philosophical writings of Karol Wojtyła, entitled Metafisica della persona [Metaphysics of

the Person], Rocco Buttiglione stressed that Wojtyła’s output manifests an important

characteristic, namely the author’s appreciation of the category of subjectivity. Yet the

subjectivity of the human person is by no means presented by him as opposed to the reality of

the external being. The special philosophical endeavor made by Wojtyła was to demonstrate

that the person, the subject, has a certain inner structure and, as such, also constitutes a being.

Thus Wojtyła would speak of the “metaphysics of the person.” The objective structure of

human life is such that the person is bound to adopt an attitude to the original gift of life. In

fact the entire life of a person is either an effort to accept this gift or a rejection of it. As true

acceptance of a gift affects the entire human being, the discovery of being a person leads man

to the discovery of the Person who is the ultimate Giver of existence. The objective structure

of the human person is manifested also by the fact that persons live in relation to other human

beings, attached to them first through family bonds and then through work they take up in

common effort. It is precisely in the reality of man’s acting together with others that Wojtyła

discovers what constitutes the human person. Human work reveals that persons can reach

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self-fulfillment in acting together with others if through work they participate in the

accomplishment of a goal which embraces true good. The category of participation extends to

the sphere of civic attitudes, among them to that of opposition towards the totalitarian regime.

The purpose of opposition should consist in the awakening of conscience in those who remain

at the service of the totalitarian power in question, as was the case with the opposition against

the communist regime symbolized by the “Solidarity” movement in Poland, and by Charter

77 in Czechoslovakia, among whose signatories was Václav Havel, later President of the

Czech Republic. Despite its methodological rigor, the philosophical output of Wojtyła,

reflects a deep influence of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

Card. Angelo Scola reflects on the condition of postmodern philosophy of man which

has removed the individual human subject from the center of reflection. The concern for the

autonomy of the subject, which was the dominant trend in modern philosophy, went against

the intuition cherished by Pascal: “Man infinitely transcends himself.” Pascal would hold that

the concept of the autonomous subject must be combined with the concept of the person, as it

was elaborated in antiquity and developed by Christian philosophers. The category of the

person proved helpful also in demonstrating that within the Jewish-Christian Revelation the

human subject is perceived as a substance. While rejecting Pascal’s idea that the

transcendence of the person involves a reference to God, modern thinkers would claim that it

was impossible to strengthen the position of the human subject in anthropology unless his

autonomy was expanded, which in turn involved breaking the communion with the Creator

and the Savior. By way of paradox, Pascal’s deep concern about man was replaced by

Nietzsche’s postulate: “Man is something that should be overcome.” The death of the

individual subject, which resulted from the adoption of a nihilistic approach, gave rise to the

emergence of a new, collective and technocratic subject, a by-product of the scientific and

technological development. Modern technology is marked by inherent directedness towards

itself: it pursues its own goals and is determined by its inner capabilities. In the new social

context and in the new technological environment the truth that man is person has been

rejected in favor of the idea that man is a product of his own actions. It was that claim that,

paradoxically, amounted to the annihilation of the personal “I” in philosophy (the so-called

“abolition” of man), and as a result of that process the very essence of the human conscience

was called into question. In this way modernity has lost the sense of the important dichotomy

between subjectivity and personality, characteristic of classical philosophy. Thus the task that

philosophers have faced today is one of retrieving man to the center of human reflection and

of restoring the proper relation between the subject and the person. In the Encyclical Letter

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Fides et Ratio Pope John Paul II referred to the classical category of the person and

considered it in the perspective of the relationship between truth and freedom, thus continuing

some of the motifs he had developed earlier as a philosopher. In his writings Wojtyła avoided

excessive criticism, directly addressed the decisive issues that come up in the primary human

experience, and spontaneously explored its language in order to work out an adequate

anthropology. The first datum of the human experience is that man performs his own actions.

The language used to describe human actions shows that man is always “situated in history,”

while anthropology based on the analysis of human experience turns out particularly apt to

grasp the moral significance of existence. The ethos of the acting person reveals that the

genuinely human experience, in all its dimensions: theological, ontological, gnoseological and

ethical, is rooted in the decision of man’s freedom. The teaching of John Paul II is informed

with Wojtyła’s adequate anthropology. The basic notions found in the language of the human

experience are: self-confirmation of the person, the relationship that binds together a man and

a woman, and the relationship that binds the person with the community. Against the claim

about the end of the subject, reflection on the person, perceived as a unity of body and soul

(the body being the sacrament of the person), proves that man can be once again retrieved to

the center of philosophy and provides the justification for the inviolable and absolute human

dignity, since the human body reveals the ultimate and radical irreducibility of man. Thus the

person may never be treated as a means to an end, as a tool or as an instrument: in dealing

with a person one must take into account the fact that he or she already has or should have his

or her own goal. In Wojtyła’s philosophy theocentrism, christocentricism, and

anthropocentrism are closely bound together. In this perspective the love between a man and a

woman becomes the foundation of a faithful and indissoluble marriage, where human fertility

finds its proper place. The emotions are not subdued to pure reactivity, and love itself,

materialized in the paternal relations, is an imago Trinitas. The relationship that binds

together a man and a woman constitutes the most elementary form of the societas, as it

provides the state of belonging, also for the new human person, born out of that relationship.

In this way, it becomes possible to restore the lost distinction between the subject and the

person, and thus overcome the problem of reconciling the individual with the society. While

considering this issue, John Paul II would speak on a whole spectrum of topics, such as

human work, market economy, social justice, peace, human rights, religious freedom and

social marginalization. He would also point that the Church, as the unity of the humanity in

God, can be a guide in adopting the rules of social organization. The unity characteristic of

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the Church is free from any form of totalitarianism and provides the righteous pattern of non-

totalitarian belonging.

The succeeding block of articles is entitled E x p e r i e n c e (I n s i g h t) a s t h e

S o u r c e o f P h i l o s o p h y.

Jarosław Merecki, SDS, presents Karol Wojtyła’s consecutive insights which resulted

in his original vision of ethics. As a thinker, Wojtyła was not concerned with building an

overall philosophical system, but instead concentrated primarily on anthropology and ethics,

the realms of philosophy which offer an understanding of the human being. All his output,

whether philosophical, theological or literary, demonstrates the intention to understand the

human being. In this way, Wojtyła subscribed to the Socratic tradition in philosophy,

symbolized by the Greek adage gnoti se auton. Indeed, the first and the fundamental as well

as the ultimate source of Wojtyła’s philosophy was the human experience itself. In his

approach to ethics he thus freely reached to the tradition of such thinkers as St. Thomas, I.

Kant and M. Scheler. His methodological postulate was to give priority to insights rather than

to ideas, which resulted in a vision of a radically empirical anthropology, founded on the

concept of experience that reaches beyond the realm of the sensual. Wojtyła held that the

experience of anything situated outside of man is always associated with the experience of

himself, as man does not experience anything exterior without experiencing himself in some

way. Although such an approach has often led in modern philosophy to the denial of the

autonomy of the exterior reality, that is, to philosophical idealism, Wojtyła did not fall into

the trap of idealism due to the fact that he remained to the end faithful to the experience in

which the horizon of being always takes priority over the horizon of conscience. The other

significant source of Wojtyła’s philosophy was phenomenology, for which everything that is

expressed corporeally is the object of experience, and which thus justifies the existence of

aesthetic, moral and religious experience side by side with the sensible one. In that area

Wojtyła elaborated a positive ethical project, beginning with his debate with Max Scheler.

Wojtyła is totally in agreement with Scheler’s fundamental postulate that ethics must stem

from experience. However, in his opinion, Scheler’s essential defect consisted, in having not

exhausted all the resources of the phenomenological method in his analysis of moral

experience. Thus Scheler’s emotivist presumption proved his ethical system inadequate for an

academic interpretation of Christian ethics. The analysis of Scheler’s concept of moral

philosophy was the starting point of Wojtyła’s own positive project of an ethics that would be

both empirical and normative. This concept, developed first by Wojtyła himself then by his

disciples, is today known as the personalist ethics of the Lublin school. Its core lies in the

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recognition of the significance of human efficacy: human persons express and realize their

full subjectivity through their actions, when they experience themselves as their genuine

subjects. Wojtyła’s theory was once described as transphenomenology: what is immediately

given to the subject transcends its own scope, and reaches towards the external. This process

demonstrates also that moral decisions are not motivated by the emotional power with which

particular values are given, but rather by their truthfulness. The rendering of what is given

into what is due takes place in the person’s conscience. The person experiences the duty to

remain faithful to the value that has been recognized as true, which reveals the foundational

normative dimension of ethics. This normativity, however, is not imposed on the human

person by the outward world, but it is born within his or her self. Thus the moral duty is not

merely the Kantian Faktum der Vernunft, but experiential evidence of the dependence on truth

that marks the human being as person. Human freedom is then conceived of not as complete

independence, although human persons are determined neither by their instincts nor by the

objects given to them in their intentional acts. The dynamism of human freedom lies in the

fact that man spontaneously – in pre-reflexive acts – recognizes his own dependence on truth.

While trying to contradict a state of affairs he has recognized as factual, he finds himself at

odds with his own inner self, thus introducing disunity into his own being. In his conception

of ethics Wojtyła was able to avoid the one-sidedness of both Kant’s and Scheler’s theories,

while simultaneously preserving what he had found valuable in both of them. As Pope John

Paul II, he incorporated his vision of ethics into a broader metaphysics, at the same times

stressing the necessity of appreciation of metaphysics in philosophy and holding that in

philosophy one should move from phenomenon to foundation.

Andrzej Półtawski writes about Karol Wojtyła’s philosophy as seen against the

background of phenomenology.2 The most important goal which the members of the

phenomenological movement are trying to achieve is to ground philosophy on a full

description of human direct experience. According to the founder of the movement, Edmund

Husserl, our knowledge of the “external”, world is based solely on perception, and he

analyzed perception, in the vein of the British Empiricists, in the terms the scheme “sense-

data ― their interpretation or «apprehension» by intellectual «acts of consciousness» as a

certain object”. This was an intellectual construction, adopted in the context of the Cartesian

theory of knowledge, and one should not regard the idealistic consequences of its adoption as

a decisive argument against the phenomenological method in general. Karol Wojtyła was

2 The following summary was provided by the Author of the article and at the Author's wish was not subject to any adjustments.

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from the beginning of his theoretical work interested in analysing direct experience. In his

habilitation work, Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics based on

the System of Max Scheler, while stressing the necessity of applying phenomenological

description in ethical research, Wojtyła tried to show that Scheler did not exhaust all the

possibilities of this method because he did not analyze the phenomenon of conscience. In his

main philosophical work, The Acting Person, Wojtyła discerned between on the one hand,

what only “happens” in a person and, on the other, a conscious human action, a distinction

which does not occur in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical vocabulary, and which

presupposes a phenomenological analysis of experience. He stressed that characteristic of

genuinely human experience was the phenomenon of conscience, a phenomenon intrinsically

connected with action, and that man is a morally developing (or decaying) person. This is his

“perfectiorism”. Basing, in this way, phenomenological description on moral experience

enabled cardinal Wojtyła to directly connect human conscience with the real, “external” world

and to show that values ― in particular good and evil ― are secondary in relation to norms

and are not just some sort of qualities. Thus, Wojtyła has shown the necessity of using

phenomenological description in philosophy and, at the same time, of abandoning a certain

sensualism characteristic of the early phenomenological movement. By doing this, he traced

the way to a full philosophical realism of the world in which human persons live and act.

Fr. Alfred Wierzbicki draws on outline of Karol Wojtyła’s anthropology conveyed by

his poetry. Already in his early days Wojtyła combined the activity of a poet and a

philosopher with that of a theologian. The poetic current which then started would continue

throughout his life, and was crowned, in the 25th year of John Paul II’s pontificate, with the

Roman Triptych. The Italian philosopher Giovanni Reale has called Karol Wojtyła – John

Paul II a pilgrim of the absolute striving to reach the ultimate source of being on a threefold

way of poetry, philosophy and theology. Indeed, the essential motifs that appear in the poetry

and thought of Karol Wojtyła, as well as in his teaching as Pope John Paul II, centered on the

contemplation of God who became man. In the output of Wojtyła, poetry was by no means

marginal as far as his intellectual strivings were concerned, and in some instances his poetic

visions actually preceded the philosophical insights he would include in his further writings.

Wojtyła’s poems belong within the current of intellectual poetry represented by such authors

as Dante, Hölderlin, Norwid, Eliot and Miłosz. On the other hand, a strong mystical bent puts

Wojtyła’s poetry in the tradition of St. John of the Cross. The ultimate source of this poetry

was fascination with man and with his personal being. In its metaphysical dimension

Wojtyła’s poetry aimed at deciphering the ultimate mystery of the human existence. Without

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art, held Wojtyła, human spirituality, human resemblance to God, could not be fully revealed,

and he continued this idea also in his teaching as Pope, which can be seen in the opening

sentences of his Letter to Artists. Another source of Wojtyła’s poetry, as well as that of his

anthropological ideas, was bewilderment with man and the world. The depth of his poetic

vision is striking especially in his early poems: Thought – Strange Space (of 1952), The

Quarry (of 1956) and Profiles of a Cyrenean (of 1957). All of them share the formal

characteristics of being multi-part and multi-layer, and they evoke the problem of the human

inner self facing the Absolute, the philosophical category of participation and the need to

overcome the attitude of alienation.

The next block of articles bears the title L o v e f o r t h e M e a s u r e o f t h e

H u m a n P e r s o n.

Wojciech Chudy presents a philosophical analysis of human love, drawing on the

conception presented by Karol Wojtyła, as well as on his own definition of the person as the

value built upon a set of axiological characteristics, namely: freedom (pertaining to the will),

truth (pertaining to the reason or intellect), corporeality, and dignity, this last one

distinguishing the human being from the other beings in the world. In considering the

phenomenon of love, specific for personal beings, one should first identify two aspects,

namely the psychological one (love as a human need) and the ethical one (love as a human

gift). These two orders of love intertwine in the case of any love, though one can establish an

axiological hierarchy between them: love as a gift stands higher. Karol Wojtyła distinguishes

four types of love in the relationship between a man and a woman: love as attraction, love as

desire, love as good will, and betrothed love, unselfish giving of self. Betrothed love

constitutes the most perfect kind of love and it embraces both the love between spouses and

the love of a religious person for God. Betrothed love between spouses is characterized by:

the giving of one’s difference to the other, an absolute gift of self, openness to the other

person, openness to the possibility of the conception of a child, and so openness to God who

remains present in the act of marital love. In the case of betrothed love concerning the

spouses, however, one must note the primate of the person over the relationship as such. The

structure of betrothed love explains the indissolubility of the marital relationship, as well as

provides the ground for the norms forbidding betrayal or contraception. It is interesting to

observe, however, that betrothed love does not necessarily assume mutuality. The conception

of love fostered by Wojtyła was to become the basis of his concept of the civilization of love:

a normative project of the human society in which human dignity occupies the central place.

In John Paul II’s vision marriage and the family, the realities that spring up from human love,

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play the most significant role in the human history. The universal characteristics of love that

can be found in the conception presented by Karol Wojtyła and further on developed by John

Paul II in his papal teaching comprise unselfishness and unity with others. Thus, love can be

defined in this approach as unselfish will to give. Such a pattern of love can be observed also

in the biblical history of the chooseness of Israel by God and in the faithfulness of God to the

people of Israel despite their disobedience.

Andrzej Szostek, MIC, draws an outline of the perspectives in which Karol Wojtyła

situated the question of love. Although they involve such a broad spectrum as that of ethics,

anthropology, Biblical studies, and theology, they all appear to be deepening one basic

insight. The question of love was analyzed by Wojtyła in such works as: Love and

Responsibility and The Acting Person, as well as in his cycle of catecheses entitled Man and

Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, which he delivered already as Pope. The

topic of love is that in which Wojtyła’s anthropology fuses with his concept of ethics, which

in turn involves a specific vision of freedom. According to Wojtyła, human freedom is above

all self-determination which rests on the relationship to truth. Wojtyła based his philosophy

on a specific interpretation of the human experience. He openly rejected sensualist concepts

of experience, as well as those characteristic of epistemological idealism, as they fail to

explain sufficiently the prephilosophical yet basic human experience of a moral dilemma.

Instead, Wojtyła held that the foundational experience that manifests the freedom of the moral

subject is that of his efficacy. It is precisely human actions that reveal human freedom. If one

accepts determinist presumptions, thus rejecting the distinction between the categories of

agere and pati, and holds that freedom is merely illusion, the result will be a reduction of

ethics to psychology or sociology of morality. However, instead of entering a debate with the

followers of determinist approaches, Wojtyła preferred to gradually uncover the richness

behind the expression “the acting person.” If the foundational human experience is that of

efficacy, he held, then freedom turns out the capability of self-determination, which involves

the transcendence of the person in the action. It is through his or her actions that the human

person “builds up” his or her self. The necessary conditions of self-determination are self-

governance and self-possession. Yet, the acts of self-determination, in order to serve the

person’s self-fulfillment, must be referred to the truth about the good. “The transcendence of

the person in the action does not consist solely either in the ontological autonomy, or self-

centred dependence on the ego. It includes also the indispensable and essential moment of

reference to «truth,» and it is this moment that ultimately determines freedom. [...] The

dependence upon truth marks out our borderliness of the autonomy appropriate to the human

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person,” says Wojtyła in The Acting Person. The human conscience reveals the dependence

on a specific mode of “truth” inherent in human freedom. Thus, the most characteristic feature

of this vision of freedom is the stress on the normative power of truth, discovered in

conscience. Indeed, Wojtyła held that the apparent elevation of human freedom in the sense of

depriving it of its subordination to truth or in the sense of questioning any essentially

determined truth as such results in the subordination of the human person either to some

subhuman drives or to some externally imposed ideas. Such a vision of freedom turns out

crucial also to Wojtyła’s concept of love: its core is the vision of a free and unselfish gift of

self. This concept of love appears somewhat paradoxical as it demonstrates that the self-

fulfillment of a person is in a way dependent on his or her abandonment of the faculty of

deciding about him- or herself, which is part of the free gift of self offered to the beloved

person. However, human openness to love is by no means exhausted by the individual’s

interpersonal relationships, as it also demonstrates a social dimension, which Wojtyła

describes by means of the concept of participation and the attitude of solidarity consisting in

the subject’s identification with the common good of the community. The counterpart of

solidarity is another authentic attitude proper in situations in which one does not identify with

the good fostered by the community, namely that of opposition. However, while the attitude

of solidarity must be sharply distinguished from that of conformism, the attitude of opposition

must not be identified with that of noninvolvement. Promotion of authentic attitudes serves to

prevent the phenomenon of alienation which, as the opposite of participation, undermines the

purpose of a human community.

Jarosław Kupczak, OP, analyzes Karol Wojtyła’s theory of love as can be found in his

philosophical writings. The central concepts of that theory are those of the “gift of self” and

the “logic of the gift.” Wojtyła’s reflection on love was born from his pastoral ministry as

well as from his work of a catechist of the youth and organizer of courses for the betrothed.

Already in his early articles one can trace certain elements that would later constitute the

foundation of his anthropological vision of man in which human freedom is conceived of as

not merely the choice between two alternatives, but as self-determination that aims at self-

fulfillment of the human person. Precisely this concept of freedom was to be advanced in the

future by John Paul II in his encyclical letters. A multi-level analysis of the phenomenon of

love, seen from the point of view of metaphysics, psychology and ethics, can be found in

Wojtyła’s monograph Love and Responsibility of 1960. The classical distinction between love

as attraction, love as desire and love as goodwill is enriched here with an analysis of still

another kind of love, namely betrothed love which consists in the gift of self bestowed onto

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the chosen person. Indeed, the mutual gift of self, unique in its totality and absoluteness,

becomes the centre of betrothed love. A gift of that kind, in order to come into being, involves

also receptivity, described by some philosophers as a virtue. Thus the mutual gift of self

constitutes the foundation of the marriage and of the family. Wojtyła’s ideas concerning

betrothed love in fact preceded the modern renaissance of the notion of the gift in the fields of

cultural anthropology and phenomenology. Pope John Paul II even broadened the

anthropological and ethical concept of the gift by applying it in the theological context. The

perception of existence as a gift leads to the construction of a new theodicy and natural

theology which ascends from the gift to the Giver, and is parallel to Thomas Aquinas’s

arguments for the existence of the Absolute. Thus the notion of the gift has become the

keystone of various aspects of theology, namely trinitarian theology, ecclesiology,

anthropology, ethics, theology of the marriage and family, as well as metaphysics.

The next section is entitled T h e E t h o s o f W o r k and it includes in the first place

an extract from the so-far unpublished summary of Fr. Karol Wojtyła’s course lectures on the

Catholic Social Teaching, delivered at the Jagiellonian University throughout the academic

year 1953-1954.

Jerzy Gałkowski explores the subject of human work as it was seen by Karol Wojtyła

when he was Archbishop of Cracow and later when he became Pope John Paul II. The papal

teaching on human work was presented for the first time in the Encyclical Letter Laborem

exercens (of 1981), and then in the following social encyclicals as well as in occasional

addresses. Yet the foundation of this teaching was provided in his earlier philosophical

writings and pastoral addresses, which were also Wojtyła’s response to the particular situation

of the communist Poland, where human rights were abused also in the sphere of work.

Wojtyła’s anthropological writings would make an indirect reference to the predicament of

Poles who were at the time subjected to the Marxist-Leninist propaganda and to the new,

morally degrading, political and economic system. Although communists were apparently

referring to the reality and value of human work, one could hardly point to a system in which

work would be more depreciated than it was in communism. The economy being nationalized,

the communal property had no real owner, which was accompanied by the totalitarian

tendency to central planning and to controlling the lives of the people. Another characteristic

of the new situation was a growth of the police force and of bureaucracy. The bond between

work and pay was broken, and the constant economic shortages and political crises resulted in

the shaping of a new mentality, of a new morality of work which was based on deceit.

Wojtyła addressed this new situation in his philosophical and theological writings in which he

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pointed to the fact that the human person lives through his or her actions, seeking for their

ultimate and objective justification which would be stronger than merely subjective certainty.

According to Wojtyła, this type of philosophical reflection is rooted in the human nature as

such. Thus he ventured to explore the inner human experience as it is perceived by the moral

subject him- or herself and to describe how this experience involves other persons. Respect

for the human rights, he held, demands a full understanding of their essence. The problem of

work is situated at the meeting point of the two planes, namely man’s participation in the

communal dimension of his nature and man’s participation in the kingly power of Christ. The

epistemological foundation of Wojtyła’s personalistic anthropology, also of his understanding

of work, is man’s experience of his own actions and of the actions performed by him together

with others. Wojtyła pointed out that the relationship between man and the community is

ideally based on the attitude of solidarity manifested in the readiness to undertake one’s tasks

within the community and to assume the responsibility for one’s efforts. A particular task

consists in transforming the world, of humanizing it through manual labour, science and

technology. Human work manifests its effects on the subjective plane (man fulfills himself

through work) and the objective one (owing to human work, the Kingdom of God is built).

Yet material progress does not exhaust the sense of work, while remaining an element, an

instrument and a condition of human fulfillment which is accomplished through moral

progress. Work is done through the actions which have both transitive and intransitive

consequences for the human person. The anthropological sense of work lies in the

development of an already existing being. It is above all himself that man builds through his

own actions. Thus the vision of work Wojtyła cherished would point to the primacy of ethics

over economics as well as to the primacy of morals over economy. He also held in that

context that the dignity of human work demands respect for the freedom of conscience.

Violence done to conscience results in the attitudes of conformism and avoidance, while

freedom of conscience implies its integrity, as well as responsibility on various planes of

social life.

The succeeding section is entitled T h e T i m e o f T h a n k s g i v i n g a n d N e w

T a s k s and it includes a report by the staff of the Institute of John Paul II at the Catholic

University of Lublin on the recent changes in the Board and authorities of the Institute.

The main theme of the issue, namely reflection on Karol Wojtyła’s philosophy, is

completed with a block of texts entitled D e u s c a r i t a s e s t – a n E n c y c l i c a l o n

L o v e concerning the vision of love as it was presented by Pope Benedict XVI in his first

encyclical.

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Giovanni Salmeri reflects on the apparent dualism between the conceptions of love

conceived of as respectively eros and agape and used by theologians Karl Barth and Anders

Nygren in order to contrast two visions of love: the Christian one (the Christian agape with its

message of God’s unselfish love) and the pagan one (the pagan eros based on an egoistic

drive), as antagonistic and impossible to reconcile. According to Barth and Nygern, the

ambiguity of the notion of love becomes manifest in consequence of the continuous attempts

to fuse these two visions and to obliterate the borders between them. However, regardless of

the linguistic considerations and the novelty in the understanding of love introduced by

Christianity, the human experience shows love itself, as well as the ways of approaching it, as

both magnificent and fragile. This characteristic applies both to bodily and spiritual love. In

the theological sense, only Divine love does not exhibit any ambiguity of this kind, yet love

conceived of in such a radical way, remains in itself unknowable. No love that can be

cognitively grasped by the human mind remains completely free from the ambiguity of the

tension between eros and agape. A description of the impersonal shape of eros can be found

in the philosophy of Plato, who held that ultimately love is not directed onto a given human

person, but rather onto a universal, impersonal value that transcends any human being, thus

constituting the highest goal of human cognition and action. On the same principle, the human

fascination with beauty evokes the universal idea of beauty which is manifested in each

beautiful thing. In antiquity, two attempts were made at adapting Plato’s theory to the

phenomenon of marital love, and they were expressed respectively in Plutarch’s Erotikos and

in Origen’s commentary on the Song of Songs. While Plutarch’s approach turned out

thoroughly Platonic, Origen argued that the love that engulfs the human being from his or her

youth is precisely the same love that leads the human person to God. Thus the love for one’s

spouse is itself holy while the biblical agape and Plato’s eros express the same reality. The

problem of the apparent conflict between sensual and spiritual love was dramatically posed

once again by the medieval mystic Richard of St. Victor, after Origen’s idea that Christian

love reflects the immeasurable depth of Divine love had been already absorbed by theology.

Richard describes caritas as violent, as shaking the very foundations of one’s life, as

obsessive, absorbing and ultimately destructible, as exhausting and ultimately as descent into

madness. The state of being in love which encompasses the entire human being, refers both to

human and divine eros. Yet he concludes that in the case of marital love its further stages

should be avoided so that the spouses could fulfill their duties in the world, while in the case

of the love for God the total loss of self is justified by the infinite and absolute value towards

which this love is heading. Only God deserves the madness of love. As can be seen from the

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above examples, reflections on love are necessarily moved from the plane of eros to that of

anthropology and theology. The history of Chrisianity is, according to the testimony of the

Bible, the story of love which is told and listened to.

Sergio Belardinelli refers to Pope Benedict XVI’s programmatic Encyclical Letter

Deus caritas est in order to demonstrate how the caritas practised by the Church differs from

the social aid, humanitarian assistance and philanthropy provided by the lay society. The

difference in question involves the essence of any charitable activity. To Christians, Jesus

Christ is not only a gift, but also a commandment that determines their perception, also their

involvement in social life. In that context, Benedict XVI has stressed that every Christian is

called to love conceived of as both eros and agape. Moreover, mature love calls into play all

human potentialities and it engages the whole human person. The commandment of love

should be seen as the necessary interplay between the love of God and the love of neighbour,

and remain, as such, the touchstone of the Christian individual and communal life. “For the

Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but

is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being” (Deus caritas est, No.

25). Thus Christian charity is seen by the Pope as a particular task which often involves the

meeting between the faith and the reason, for instance in cases of injustice, where the two

mutually enlighten each other. By enlightening politics about the sense of genuine justice, the

faith protects politics from the danger of being subordinated to the exercise of power on the

one hand, and from succumbing to the temptation of self-sufficiency on the other. This task is

of particular significance as modern politics rests on materialistic and individualistic

anthropological presumptions and either reduces the individual to the communal or sets these

two dimensions of human life against each other. The “deficit” of anthropology in the modern

world is manifested by frequent instances of the complex social dialectics being reduced to

the dialectics of the state and the citizen. The tragedies brought about by the totalitarian

regimes of the 20th century, as well as the failure of the so-called welfare state make the

problem of justice even more dramatic. In the face of the present social condition of the

world, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the essential fragility of human life, which

belongs among its ontological properties, cannot be eliminated by the state, and calls for a

proper application of the principle of subsidiarity in the relations between the state and

various social organizations, among them the Church. Yet it must be noted that the Church is

not simply an agency of social assistance and that the Church’s charitable activity must

maintain all of its splendour. According to Benedict XVI, among the essential elements of

Christian and ecclesial charity, are simple response to immediate needs and specific

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situations, and formation of the heart on the part of charity workers. The principle of all

Christian charity is to be found in Jesus Christ. Born out of the faith, caritas must remain

independent of parties or ideologies. Furthermore, charity cannot be used as a means of

engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism: Love is free; it must not be practised as

a way of achieving other ends. It is interesting that in most currents of modern philosophy one

can notice a pursuit for a functional equivalent of Divine Love which could provide and

safeguard – both in the ontological and in the moral sense - the good of the being. Therefore it

is worthwhile stressing the unbreakable bond between the love of God and the love of

neighbour, in particular, when the attempts at constructing a just society based on mutual

respect of individuals have failed and when the great contemporary ideals of autonomy and

individual freedom detached from any metaphysical order (also from the order of love), as

e.g. Niklas Luhmann’s functionalism, have manifested their destructive potential.

The succeeding section, entitled F a t h e r P r o f e s s o r J a n u s z N a g ó r n y

(1 9 5 0 - 2 0 0 6 ): L o v e a n d t h e C r o s s, is devoted to the profile of the late Father

Professor Janusz Nagórny, long-term member of the Board of the John Paul II Institute at the

Catholic University of Lublin and close collaborator of the Editorial Board of the Quarterly

Ethos. The section opens commences with two lists of Fr. J. Nagórny’s publications, included

respectively in the Ethos and in the books published by the John Paul II Institute at the

Catholic University of Lublin. Then follows the text of the funeral homily for Fr. J. Nagórny,

delivered by Fr. Krzysztof Jeżyna. A lengthy biography of Father Janusz Nagórny, including

a description of his family background, education and personality, as well as the broad scope

of his research interests, was prepared by Andrzej Derdziuk, OFMCap. The section concludes

with Fr. Janusz Nagórny’s commentary, written in 1997, on Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical

Letter Evangelium vitae. In the text, Father Nagórny concentrated on an analysis of the

notions “culture of death” and “culture of life” employed by the Holy Father in the encyclical

and referred them to the reality of life in the modern world.

The standing column T h i n k i n g a b o u t t h e F a t h e r l a n d… includes an extract

from Karol Wojtyła’s poem entitled Easter Vigil.

The section devoted to N o t e s a n d R e v i e w s includes Władysław Stróżewski’s

review of Kazimierz Krajewski’s Etyka jako filozofia pierwsza. Doświadczenie normatywnej

mocy prawdy źródłem i podstawą etyki [Ethics as First Philosophy: The Experience of the

Normative power of Truth is the Source and the Foundation of Ethics], Agnieszka Lekka-

Kowalik’s reflections on Ryszard Legutko’s Raj przywrócony [Paradise Retrieved] and

Joanna Michalczuk’s review of J. Popiel’s Los artysty w czasach zniewolenia. Teatr

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Rapsodyczny 1941-1967 [The Fate of an Artist in the Time of Coercion. The Rhapsodic

Theatre 1941-1967].

The section concludes with the P r o p o s a l s o f t h e E t h o s.

The section R e p o r t s comprises a report on a patristic symposium “John Paul II and

Christian Antiquity” by Beata Pawłowska and Józef Figiel, SDS, held by Committee for

Research on Christian Antiquity at the Catholic University of Lublin, Paweł Kawalec’s report

on the conference “Father Professor Kamiński’s Methodological Ideas” held by the

Department of Methodology of Science at the Catholic University of Lublin and Marcin

Lizut’s report on a session “Responsibility for the Measure of Possibility” in the series

“Ethics and Technology” held by the Department of Applied Ethics at the Catholic University

of Lublin.

The section entitled T h e P o n t i f i c a t e o f B e n e d i c t X V I includes two texts

on the reception of Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic journey to Turkey that took place between

28th November 2006 and 1 December 2006. First, Marek Blaza, SJ, writes on the meeting of

the Pope with Patriarch Bartholomew and on the atmosphere of hope that permeated their

addresses, and then Zygmunt Kwiatkowski, SJ, analyzes the Pope’s journey in the perspective

of the mutual relationships between Christianity and Islam.

The section T h r o u g h t h e P r i s m o f t h e E t h o s includes the letter sent by Fr.

Tadeusz Styczeń to the President of the Republic of Poland Lech Kaczyński.

The section of Bibliography contains a bibliography of John Paul II’s addresses to

philosophers.

The section concludes with N o t e s a b o u t t h e A u t h o r s.

Summarized by Dorota Chabrajska

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